Fear and Loathing in Your Kitchen

As longtime readers of Center For Consumer Freedom Daily Headlines know, and our new readers will soon discover, there’s nothing benign about the anti-consumer-choice crowd. When Americans are afraid, these groups cash in on fear… and very often, they’ll even create it.

Take fear profiteer John Stauber, of the Center for Media and Democracy. He made his name with the 1997 polemic “Mad Cow U.S.A.,” one of the first salvos in the disinformation campaign against beef. (We have all the details on “mad cow” propaganda in our special report, “Mad Cow: A New American Scare Campaign.”) Now, Stauber wants you to think “mad cow” — which even Stauber’s co-author has said “the USDA has yet to detect” in the United States — “needs to be treated at least as seriously as the threat of a terrorist attack involving anthrax.” But as Reuters reported last week, “mad cow disease and the illness thought to be its human equivalent may not be linked.”

Stauber isn’t the only anti-food-choice fanatic exploiting Americans’ very real concerns about anthrax. Anti-milk activist Robert Cohen warns that an “X-Files”-eqsue cabal of “government authorities” are hiding a mass anthrax epidemic, insisting that “evidence of infected cows and cattle have all but disappeared from the Internet.” In Oliver Stone style, Cohen says “anthrax is here,” but “government officials elected to contain and then censor the story that has now become America’s worst nightmare.”

“Vegetarians of the world, unite,” Cohen proclaims. “It is time to teach meat eaters and milk drinkers that eating the flesh of diseased animals and drinking their body fluids does not do one’s body any good.”